January 06th, 2026

We had an exciting and scary few minutes recently.  It was sort of like the movie, the Great Escape .  

Gotta back up first to tell the tale properly.

Not sure if you remember or not, but shortly after the kittyboys came into our lives, Tim bought these windows hammocks for them.  And of course, they adore the hammocks. Hammocks must have been invented with cats or people behaving like cats, in mind.  Relaxing, napping, resting, sleeping and catching a few Z's are what hammocks are perfect for and cats excel in those activities (or perhaps non-activities) like no others.  It's absolutely normal to find both hammocks occupied.  One hammock is in Tim's office window and one is in our bedroom window.  

Here is an example of Brysco lounging in the bedroom hammock.  From this vantage point they spend hours napping and spying on our lovely neighbor and her dogs.  They can also nap and see cars drive by, bicyclers, walkers and of course any random bird, squirrel or lizard that happens by.  Mostly they nap.

 
Sometimes the guys get really excited about something happening outside the window and both of them crowd the hammock, of necessity pressing against screen.  Neither Wyatt nor Brysco is especially large so even their combined presence at the window never crossed my mind as being possibly problematic.  

Which, I suppose, means it was my fault entirely.

It happened last Wednesday, Museum day.  I was still at work but my day was nearly done  and Tim was about to get ready to leave to pick me up. He was trying to finish one last thing before  he shut down when Brysco came running into his office, meowing.  Tim reached down to pet him but Brysco jumped up into the office hammock, still sounding distressed.  Odd.  So Tim went to the window and looked out.  He saw nothing alarming, just the usual stuff.  So he petted Brysco, grabbed his wallet and keys and zoomed out the door.

Luckily, the museum is only about a 5 minutes drive from home so the entire round trip was less than a quarter of an hour because as we approached the driveway, Tim noticed something worrisome.  He pulled into our driveway, tossed me the keys and leapt from the car.  I stood sat for a second wondering what on earth as going on, got out, walked to the door, unlocked, walked in and heard a cat meow. The sound was coming from my right, which means, Tim's office or our bedroom.  

As soon as I turned down the hallway, I immediately saw a cat in the window but it didn't look right.  It took me a second for all of the marbles to fall into their proper holes in my brain and to realize that the thing that was wrong was that the cat was on the wrong side of the window!   Sometimes I'm not too bright. What??  I hobbled as quickly as possible to the window murmuring reassuring words but Brysco was panicked beyond reason.

I turned and hobbled outside as fast as I could (not all that fast sadly) and moved to that side of the exterior of the house just in time to see Tim loading Brysco into the house through our bedroom window.  The screen was laying on the ground.  What on Earth?    Tim quickly assured me that both boys were inside now, freaked out, but safely inside.

While Tim replaced the screen, I went back inside to check on the guys.  They were wide eyed and terrified! Poor Babies!   Wyatt, as always, dived under the bed in the guest room for awhile. Brysco clung to us like a limpet.  Eventually Wyatt crept slowly out from under the bed and joined us.  After much reassurance and a few kitty treats, they calmed down a little bit but didn't let us our of their sight for the rest of the day.

As best as we can reconstruct the situation.  Both boys must have been in the bedroom hammock, crowding the window when the screen gave way and Wyatt fell out.  Brysco ran into the office to alert Tim who, when he looked out the window, saw nothing amiss and left to pick me up.  Since no human was of any help, Brysco also jumped out the window to "help" his brother.  Tim's guess was that they were just going from window to window, hoping that we would see them and let them back in when we returned.    At least they panicked correctly and didn't run away!!

Tim spent part of the weekend screwing some sort of screen locks into place so that we have no repeats of this by the way which eases my mind tremendously!

Now that it's all over and everybody is fine, traumatized but fine, I have to chuckle a bit because when we selected these boys at the Cat Shelter, we were told by the workers there that since Brysco and Wyatt were a) ferals and b) at 6 months a little older than most,  we shouldn't expect them to bond with us. HAH!  Loves wins again.  Those babies are so bonded to us that it ain't funny.  They had a perfect opportunity to make a dash for freedom or at least an adventure but all they wanted was to be back inside with us.

So ends the tale of The Great Escape, Kitty Edition

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